Hop Frog

You write in the liner notes [to The Raven] that Poe is more attuned to our century than he was to his own.

I think that we can relate more to him now than then. Recent world events seem to have a real Poe turn to them.

Lou Reed, to Larry Katz, January 2003.

Sometime in December 1966, David Bowie heard the voice of Lou Reed for the first time. Bowie put on an album that his manager had brought back from New York. First came a sweet, haunting “Sunday Morning,” then, out of nowhere, another voice breaks in: flat, unimpressed, working up the details. Up to LEX-ing-TUN: ONE-TWO-FIVE. Hey WHITE BOY. Here he cooomes..he’s all dressed-in-BLACK. Everybody’s pinned you but NOBODY caaaares.

In August 1972, Bowie produced a record for Reed. At the brink of exhaustion (he was rehearsing with the Spiders From Mars in his downtime), Bowie had to contend with an icy Reed, barely talking and taking in the whole enterprise as if he was a critic silently watching a faltering stage act. Reed had offered some skeletal songs on acoustic guitar. Mick Ronson dressed them up, Bowie did vocal arrangements. There was a delicacy to Bowie’s work that belied the strain he was under: the little dancing motifs in “Satellite of Love,” the girl-group “spoke spoke” in “Wagon Wheel,” the acidic queen harmony in “New York Telephone Conversation.”

At last, despite the occasional public dust-up, the two settled into being friends, living within walking distance of each other’s NYC homes. In the months after 9/11, Reed was working on an album based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems, and he asked Bowie if he wanted to sing on a track. Bowie chose “Hop Frog,” a little rant under two minutes long.

“That’s him, not me,” Reed told Venice magazine in 2003. “He chose that part. I was pretty astonished myself, because I thought he would have picked one of the other parts. I thought he would go for one of the power ballads, but it turns out that he was a perfect Hop Frog. I realized that David wanted to have some fun, and have some fun just being Bowie. He did the kind of background vocals on this that I really like, all the way back to my Transformer record when he did those kind of things. I liked it then and I still love it now.”

It would be their last collaboration.

Reed had been asked to write some Poe-related songs by the stage director Robert Wilson for a show, “POEtry,” which played in Hamburg and Brooklyn. “Bob thought this is something that could occur easily, without any weird rubbings going on,” Reed told the New York Times. “I saw it as a can’t-win situation. I knew people would say, ‘How dare he rewrite Poe?’ But I thought, here’s the opportunity of a lifetime for real fun…It’s accessible, among other things. And I felt I was in league with the master. In that kind of psychology, that interest in the drives and the meaning of obsession and compulsion in that realm Poe reigns supreme. Particularly now, with the anxiety and everything else that’s permeating our lives right now.”

“Can you imagine what it took to do that?” Reed asked Uncut. “I mean, I’m serious. Imagine! Even now I can’t believe that we’ve done it. This might be a nice way to say ‘Goodbye’, a good way to go out…it’s like ‘Pheww!’ Really. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll get a chance to make records like this with people downloading their music… unless you take the viewpoint that there’s only one good track on it.”

The Raven was also a farewell and tribute to the late 20th Century “pop” bohemian New York, the NYC of The Performance Group and The Knitting Factory, the Kitchen and St. Ann’s Warehouse. Reed cut “Fire Music,” a piece of extended feedback, a few days after the WTC attacks. On the album, it’s preceded by Amanda Plummer screaming “Burn, monkeys! Burn!” (why? see below).

Reed’s “Hop Frog” has little to do with Poe’s story, a lurid revenge piece in the line of “Cask of Amontillado.” (The following tracks, “Every Frog Has Its Day,” “The Courtly Orangutans” and “Tripitena’s Speech,” are the narrative). Hop-Frog, a dwarf who walks with a limp, is the slave of a cruel king, for whom he’s the long-suffering court jester (you get the idea George R.R. Martin may have read this story). Offended by the king throwing a drink in the face of fellow dwarf Tripetta (renamed “Tripitena” here), Hop-Frog devises a scheme in which he has the king and his ministers dress up as escaped orangutans for a masked ball. Their costumes are made of pitch and flax, the “orangutans” are chained together to further the illusion. Hop-Frog sets them ablaze, leaving the king and his party as torched ape-men corpses. He escapes after announcing “I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”

Reed’s “Hop Frog” essentially plays off that last line. It’s a strut, a boast, savoring the clash of “ahp” and “ahg” sounds in the title. Its backdrop is a vein of feedback, a vicious, cycling Reed rhythm guitar and Tony Smith’s heavy-mixed drums. Bowie holds back a bit in the first verse, creeping in to echo, then top Reed’s voice. Then he sets about taking over the song.

Now dominating over Reed’s voice, Bowie devised a set of background harmonies, a funfair ride of rising and falling phrases (“I love David’s background parts that he does, when he goes up really high: I love his voice,” Reed told Australian DJ John Faine) and outfitting an army of Bowies for the final verse. Bowie’s having a whale of a time. You can see me in the ballroom!You can see me in the BED-room!You can see me in the WOODS! Hap!-HOP FROG! He closes with a last, plummeting trademark “wail” note. Reed pays him homage with a fanfare on guitar. Exeunt omnes.

Everything ends. Reed and Bowie went out with a noisy nose-tweak of a track starring a vengeful, murderous Poe dwarf. Sounds about right. See you, Lou.

Recorded October-early November 2001, New York. Released 28 January 2003 on The Raven (released in single and double-CD versions. If you have Spotify, unabridged version’s here.)

Top: Julian Schnabel, “Lou Reed,” 2002; Bowie and Lou, approaching the end of the game, 2007; Arthur Rackham, “Hop-Frog, Trippetta, the king and his councilors,” 1935.

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12 Responses to Hop Frog

A nice bit of fun if not much more than that. It goes without saying that Reed was a huge influence on Bowie. Along with Scott Walker and Neil Young he is someone who’s impact can be felt throughout his career. And you can bet if Bowie does ever play live again White light/white heat will get another spin.

I really miss Lou Reed. Even now, a year since his death its hard to believe that someone so much larger than life could be gone. In the weeks following his passing, a bunch of local musicians here in Melbourne organised a tribute concert at a local pub. Running an entire afternoon and evening, each participant was assigned 2 or 3 songs from Reed’s entire catalogue (even Metal Machine Music was given an airing.)
A friend of mine who owns a local record shop and plays a mean guitar was given Rock and Roll Heart, Magic and Loss, and Satellite of Love. He asked me to join him on backup vocals, but when push came to shove I got a massive case of stage fright and slunk into the shadows in the back of the room when he called me up on stage. A pitiful effort from someone who, as you know Chris, once in a galaxy far away, wanted to be a rock’n’roll singer, ha ha….

I had the radio on for once the other day and something of Lou’s came on and it struck me that it’s gonna be almost a year since his death. So weird.

I miss him too. When president Havel passed away I would have never thought Lou would follow him less than 2 year later. Havel was ill of health literally as long as I can remember but Lou was always something…well, barely human really. More like a fucking reciting hill with a guitar.

A moment ago I mistakenly replied to this, saying that I believed we had discussed Poe recently. I was actually trying to forward the piece to a friend, and hit “reply” instead of “forward.” Sorry — and thanks. Stu

Poe twas also recycling: the incident that climaxes the story was a real tragedy that happened in the fourteenth century: the King of France and his dissolute friends arrived at a ball dressed as “wild Men” all chained together in costumes of unraveled rope. A spark from a torch set them on fire. A woman recognized the King and threw her skirt over him, but all the others were burned to death. The incident was referred to as the “Bal des Ardents” (the Dance of The Burning Men) and was a huge scandal at the time, huge enough to echo down to Mr. Poe.

For me, 2000’s Ecstasy was Lou’s last great album, but The Raven was pretty fascinating. I like the description of it as a Viking funeral; it did have that feeling of a voluminous final statement, with a little bit of everything, some of it only vaguely related to Poe. (2011’s Lulu, with Metallica, was, of course, something else again.)

Always liked this track quite a bit. Nothing major, but certainly a lot of fun, and good enough to make me hope for a more extended DB/Lou collaboration, which was sadly not to be.

Definitely not a song I keep coming back to very often (one has to listen to the whole album really, and who has attention span for that nowadays? *hoping Lou doesn’t read this from wherever he is and won’t come haunting me after dark*). Can’t say I’m very impressed with the fact the lyrics of the song mainly consist of the words “hop” and “frog”.
I do like frogs though. And jesters.
And Lou Reed.
And Bowie.
So it could be worse.

A great post, Chris! You did a grand job of putting this wee, almost obscure, collab between two legends into a proper context.